In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

In view of the mounting wave of scholarship concerning the Harlem Renaissance author, Festus Claudius McKay (1889–1948) is at last in vogue.1 Even in his glory days McKay was something of a marginalized figure among various constituencies. During the 1920s, McKay saw himself as the wandering bard of a burgeoning black nationalism, a fugitive poet prowling the transatlantic margins of the modernist fête. Despite his disposition as an expatriate, McKay’s fidelity to formal verse forms—and above all being a black Marxist—disqualified him from entrée into the high modernist temple of T. S. Eliot et alia. When he turned to writing prose fiction, he produced Home to Harlem (1928), a best seller that marked the climax of his success as a writer. The white press generally received the novel agreeably, while black reviewers almost unanimously treated the publication as scandalous.2 That both sides regarded it as a sensational narrative of jazz, drugs, sex, and violence among “primitive” blacks is a forceful comment on the wide-ranging misreading of McKay’s project even in his own time. The problem that the nomadic McKay and his transnational, aesthetically itinerant writing inevitably posed was where to locate him. As McKay’s transnationalism is reflected by his transatlantic travels, it makes sense at this point to recall his diaspora itinerary. In 1912, under the tutelage of his first patron, Walter Jekyll, McKay published two volumes of groundbreaking Jamaican creole poetry in Kingston. Following this triumph, McKay went abroad. He first traveled to Alabama to attend the Tuskegee Institute, but, disIntroduction Manifesting Claude McKay  * Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha satisfied with Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of compliant adaptation, he moved on to the prairie to attend Kansas State College. In 1914, he made his way to New York to marry Eulalie Imelda Edwards, a union that would end six months later. In 1918 he met his second supporter, Frank Harris, publisher of Pearson’s Magazine. Enthusiastic about his poetry, Harris would be among the first to publish McKay in the United States. In 1919 McKay met the Leninist Max Eastman , who would publish “If We Must Die” (1919) and several other poems in the Liberator, the leading American leftist magazine of the early 1920s. McKay then spent a year in England working for the Workers’ Dreadnought, a Socialist newspaper. There he published his third book of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire (1920). Upon returning to New York, he edited the Liberator with Michael Gold, and in 1922 he published his final collection of poetry, Harlem Shadows. He then promptly hopped back to Europe where on his “magic pilgrimage” to Russia he attended the still new-sprung Soviet Union’s Fourth Congress of the Third Communist International in the fall of 1922. He remained in Russia for a year, where he produced his first collection of short fiction and a cultural study of African Americans in the United States. He then resided in France until the late 1920s, where he composed Home to Harlem. He lived mainly in Paris, but also spent lengthy intervals in the Côte d’Azur, with a particular interest in the seaport town of Marseilles. In addition, captivated by “savage” Iberian culture, he sojourned in Spain, living mostly in Catalan Barcelona. In the late twenties, he drifted toward North Africa, where he lived for three years. In Morocco, he put the finishing touches on Banjo (1929) and produced Romance in Marseille (c. 1929–32); he also published his second collection of short fiction, Gingertown (1932), and a novel, Banana Bottom (1933). He returned to the United States in 1934. Although his movement seems rather erratic, McKay’s travels had a kind of logic, from modern America to the historic British Isles, from revolutionary Russia to late-empire France, from pagan Spain to Muslim Morocco. Although each destination enabled a new momentum in his life, his nomadic tendencies contributed to his declining reputation. For most of the Great Depression, critical interest in the author suffered as much as McKay, who was frequently in poor health. British police and intelligence services, law enforcement in France and French colonial authorities in North Africa, and the U.S. State Department and Bureau of Investigation took their turns at harassing McKay for two decades. By the 1940s, almost the only critical attention paid to him and his writings came in the shape of reports in a stout FBI file and “a full record of [his] political and other...

Share